DRUPAL 7 DEVELOPERS TAKES BUSINESS TO HIGHER NORMS

Fremont, CA Dec. 08, 2011 - Fremont based global technology services company DCKAP announced today it has up-shifted its Drupal development service keeping in pace with surging market growth.

Drupal is a widely used content management system (CMS) well suited for web applications of any kind from web logs (blogs) and micro sites to collaborative social communities. The versatile platform for Drupal development now comes with a new user interface, accessibility improvements, powerful image handling capabilities, support for rich content metadata, security features, scalability and database interoperability enhancements and automated tests to ensure stability. Drupal 7, the advanced version of Drupal, has features like Better HTML5, Better mobile support, Improved multilingual features, Setting up Drupal 7 on a modern web development framework. Drupal experts can build the most effective and customized business web applications.

DCKAP Drupal developer team has successfully completed and delivered a diverse range of Drupal 7 web applications for various clients’ business. DCKAP’s Drupal programmers now work from the new fully equipped development center and also on client site as required.

Drupal 7 Supports RDFa the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation for embedding XHTML metadata within documents as a technological building block for the semantic web, Updated error, security and testing frameworks with over 30,000 automated tests. Drupal7 now boasts advanced caching, master/slave replication. Administrators and editors now have updated WYSIWIG editor and Admin panels. Developers now have the Content Construction Kit (CCK) as a part of Drupal 7.

Drupal is an excellent choice of a Content management system for any business site. A Drupal site built by an expert Drupal programmer can easily grow and expand to suit the needs of any business as the business expands. It gives the business owner complete control over content on the site.

Developing effective business applications requires specialized expertise in the technologies. For a business considering contracting a Drupal development company or a Drupal Expert/ Drupal Programmer, it would be of great significance to select the right Drupal developer resources and setting out the specifications with clarity and completeness.

DRUPAL 7 vs. DRUPAL 8 – Key Features

The most awaited software Drupal8 which is yet to be released has created constant interest and expectations over the advanced features it will possess compared to its previous version Drupal7. Drupal 7 has been in development since February 2008 and was released during Jan 2011. The key features of Drupal7 includes

Great usability improvements

Drupal 7 features a menu bar built in, with quick shortcuts for things like creating and finding content (which should have icons eventually). It also has a customizable dashboard feature, which lets an individual to arrange blocks to show the most recent comments, quick links, etc. when you login, kind of like Wordpress. It also improves the organization of forms – which used to get incredibly long. Now instead of an endless sea of collapsible boxes, there is a set of tabs at the end of the form, letting you set things like revision information, comment settings, urls, etc. It’s also easier to change input formats, now using a drop down box.

Less modules to download

Usually whenever an individual starts a new Drupal site, one needs to download CCK and Imagecache before doing much of anything. In Drupal 7, they’re built in. One can add a new text field, image field, file field, etc. to a content type right out of the box. Imagecache, renamed Image Styles, is there as well, so you can crop and resize pictures.

 Now with unit testing

One can’t see this feature in the interface, but unit testing is huge leap forward for Drupal’s source code. It now uses the Simple Test framework to automatically make sure everything is functioning correctly, and that means less bugs. It also means that in the future, Drupal developer will be able to make changes more confidently, without having to worry if they’re breaking something.

Even though it is too early to talk about the features as the code freeze of Drupal 8 will occur not before 1st week of December 2012, here are some of the great things speculated to be included in Drupal8 are:-

•  Better HTML5
•  Better mobile support
•  Improved multilingual features
•  Setting up Drupal 8 on a modern web development framework

Apart from the above Drupal developers are trying to overcome the following issues faced by Drupal7:-

Learning Curve: Once an individual gets familiar with the basic mechanics of the system, it becomes second nature in how to do the most common things via programming. However, getting to that point requires referencing the documentation a lot in the beginning. The curve has steepened with Drupal 7, with the introduction of entities but in most cases one won’t need to create a custom entity. Also learning how to best use the theme layer can take time in figuring out.

Security Concerns Just like any other shared code, the risk of someone taking advantage of a security flaw is greater than it is with a totally custom system. One can minimize this risk by keeping the code up to date with security updates.

Updating: Updating the core code is not difficult. But when compared to Wordpress, it is a little more time consuming especially when one does it via FTP. There are ways in speeding up this process. But most people won’t know how to take advantage of these techniques.

Lack of Documentation: When Drupal 7 first became stable, there was very little as far as completed documentation. This made the learning curve even more difficult. Be prepared to have to do multiple Google searches in finding sample code that helps you along. Hopefully in the next year this will not be an issue.

Speed: There is a performance hit when using a system like this with all of the moving parts of the system. The cache does help things, but it still is not the fastest system out there. An improvement can be definitely seen through Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 is the first development cycle introducing so called Core initiatives. These are areas with named leads to improve Drupal programmers core in certain areas. However, this does not limit core development to these main areas; there are many community initiatives as well. The reality is that Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 are still very similar.

Digital Asset Management for Enterprise Intranets

Digital Asset Management is a specialist sub-set of Content Management, one which has developed along it's own evolutionary past. It has grown out of the needs of the traditional publishing industry to manage photographic images for print publications, and developed into an adjunct of web content management to manage still images, video and audio files as "rich media" content for web sites and other media.
 
In some cases, such as at a large distance learning University I worked at in the U.K., all content that is pulled together for "publication" as part of a production process is referred to as a "digital asset," including textual content (in the form of XML), with the aim of reaching that content management nirvana of "create once — publish many" by re-purposing the assets to customize the content for a particular media.

Just as an example, while using the CMS Wire content management system to write this article, I went to the "insert picture" facility which allowed me to browse all the images that have been previously uploaded, and choose the graphic above from Open Text. The facility allows me to see some metadata such as file size and also a thumbnail image of the graphic.

Obviously this is a simplistic use case, which in the Open Text DAM world view as shown above, fits into the right hand side of the graphic as "media use" example.

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What's Coming for Open Source CMS in April 2012

Drupal

In March, the Drupal (news, site) project held Drupalcon 2012 in Denver, CO. More than 3,000 Drupal developers and users attended, all focusing on the theme of "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device." To this end, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert discussed how the Symfony 2 PHP framework will play a key role on building "a rich mobile experience."

March also brought full support for Drupal distribution packaging. This addition enables distribution participants to develop with a consistent set of tools for managing version control, releases, issue tracking, collaboration and documentation. New features include support for external libraries, patches and development snapshots.

Those waiting eagerly for Drupal 8 can expect the feature freeze on December 1, the code freeze on February 1, 2013, and a proposed final release during August 2013. In the meantime, the call for papers and registration for DrupalCon Munich (August 20-24) has opened. Other upcoming events are DrupalCon Sao Paolo, Brazil (December 2012) and DrupalCon Portland, Ore. (2013).

Drupal company Acquia (news, site) released its Acquia Cloud API. This API allows developers to extend, enhance, and customize the Acquia Cloud. There are two major components to the API:

• A RESTful web interface allowing control of Acquia Cloud sites. Current features include support for developer workflow, database and backup management.
• Cloud Hooks, which are scripts in your code repository that Acquia Cloud executes when triggering an action.

Acquia also announced Enterprise Drupal Gardens, a SaaS offering that gives Enterprise users:

• Access to Drupal CMS capabilities such as dynamic content mashups, photo and video galleries, custom content, forms and surveys and social web experiences
• The ability to design with WYSIWYG tools that let you point and click to style page elements and themes, as well as advanced CSS tools
• The option to manage user logins through social and sharing features, letting them use IDs from Facebook (news, site), Twitter, Google+ and other popular social and business networks
• Rich media support, with the ability to embed video, images, RSS items and article previews from more than 200 sources, by pasting a URL
• One management dashboard for your Enterprise Drupal Gardens sites
• Predefined site templates where you can set brand guidelines with information architecture, page layout, content types, navigation, roles and permissions
• One-click site duplication from a template or an existing site
• The ability to integrate with third-party systems, whether you're adding Javascript libraries or accessing data from third-party analytics systems.

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For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com

UX Team Q1 2012 update

We believe that Drupal 8 User Experience needs a lot of work to truly make all users of Drupal love what they are working with. We believe that by improving core, we improve the entire Drupal experience for everyone.

How are we doing this? By working with core initiatives, providing ideas, sketches, wireframes, detailed designs, and actively engaging in discussion. D7UX taught us a lot of hard lessons, we now know how to communicate our design rationale more clearly, maintain a UX vision throughout the maze of issues, and empower developers.

What are we working on? We are working on a few initiatives; mobile, blocks & layouts, multilingual and leading a lot of smaller efforts around improving our content authoring and site building experiences.

Drupal 8 design progress so far

Content creation

Our content creation experience is still far from being great, but we have been improving the content creation experience from all angles. We have received lots of feedback on our proposals, and iterated with the community on various parts of this experience.

• Research on a interaction model for the content creation page
• Redesigning the Create Content page
• Find content iterations

We have now finalized most of our research activities and we want to start implementing a few of our major ideas. For this to happen, we need developers who want to improve this part of core.

UX team activity

The team has been busy in Q1 2012:

• Becky Gessler, Garen Checkly and Jen Lampton conducted a usability study at the Google offices, resulting in a detailed findings report and Drupalcon Denver core conversation talk on how to solve it.
• Lisa Rex, Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry), Erik Stielstra (sutha), Alexander Ross (bleen18) have done a total of 22 interviews about how people use the module page.
• Lewis Nyman has been working hard on designing Drupal’s mobile interface, resulting in interesting discussions around navigation, principles and actual implementation of ideas in the mobile issue queue.
• Roy Scholten (yoroy) has presented on Core product: 3 is the magic number and organised several sprints around UX at Drupalcon. There was also a BoF.
• Jared Ponchot has been contributing design proposals, to our effort to redesign the content creation page.
• Kristjan Jansen (kika), Jeff Noyes (Noyz) and Kevin O'Leary (tkoleary), Michael Keara (UserAdvocate) have put out various ideas around media UX, creating UI standards for add/edit flows, optimizing the content listing and research for the Blocks & layout initiative.

We have also released our ideas around redesigning the module page, adding a project browser to core, adding search everywhere, draft revisions and much more in the usability issue queue!

For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com
 Source: http://drupal.org/

Documentation Team 1st Quarter 2012 Update

Hello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team.

First off, I just want to remind everyone that I’m still planning to step down as Documentation Team Leader at the end of 2012. If you’re interested in becoming the co-leader or assistant leader now, and taking over at the end of 2012 as the main team leader, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/203258 for more information. It would be good to find someone soon!

Events

• The Documentation Team is currently holding weekly "Documentation Office Hours"—one-hour IRC meetings on Tuesday afternoon (North American time), open to anyone for questions and discussions about contributing to documentation. This schedule is likely to change soon; join the discussion about a new time for office hours.
• The API documentation cleanup sprint from last quarter has continued into this quarter. The goal is to bring the Drupal 7 and 8 core API documentation much more in line with our documentation standards. To join in, visit the issue page.

For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com
 Source: http://drupal.org/